In case you didn't know, Merit allows high school principals and guidance counselors to congratulate their alumni on their achievements. This process is very similar to how government representatives can congratulate students. Those congratulatory notes to students from their high schools are now visible inside your account.

Enhanced social media posts

We've improved what your stories look like when posted to social media. Any Merit related social media post is designed to comply with Twitter & Facebook’s image size guidelines.To make this easier, we've introduced the concept of a “default social media image”. You can find it under Settings > Branding. Your default social media image will be used in cases where an image you have included with a story does not comply with Twitter & Facebook’s image size guidelines.

Connect "approvers" to users

If your school takes advantage of Merit's approval workflow you'll notice that you can now connect users who need approval to a specific "approver". This means that when a user who "needs approval" submits a story, their "approver" will be the ONLY person who receives an email notification.

Add suffixes to students and faculty

The new feature allows you to add things like Jr., Sr., III, Ph.D and M.D. to your students and faculty in Merit.

We've improved Merit AI. The new version of our artificial intelligence platform is better at matching names and identifying individuals within online news articles.

Pin stories from your RSS feeds

You now have 3 options when viewing a story pulled in from an RSS feed. You can create an achievement, a press release (if you have Newsroom), or you can pin it to the student’s Merit page. Pinning a story, as usual, adds a snippet to the “In the News” section of a student’s page.

Blacklist select media outlets or Twitter accounts

In Clipping, you can now ignore specific news sources or Twitter accounts that regularly appear in your news clips. News from these sites will no longer clutter up your Clipping interface or in your daily emails. You can disable and enable these results as needed.